“You were so happy,” said Finley.
“I was,” said Eloise. “I loved your grandfather very much. So, so much.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone from this place,” she said. “But he’s all around us. In you, in your mommy and little Alfie, in my heart and dreams.”
“Do you still see him?”
“I do,” she said. “He seems to turn up whenever I need him most.”
Even at eight, Finley didn’t need that explained to her. “He has glittery eyes and such a nice smile. He looks just like our Alfie.”
“He does, doesn’t he?”
The Eloise who sat on the church steps looked like the girl in the picture, youthful and full of joy, everything ahead of her. The golden light that emanated off of her was warm, magnetic. Finley realized that she was lying on her belly on the ground among the gravestones.
Towering oaks shadowed the white church with its small steeple and bright red doors. A dappling light danced, sunlight fingering through the trees.
“It’s a lovely spot to rest, isn’t it?” said Eloise. “The Three Sisters deserve their place here, don’t you think?”
Finley pulled herself to her feet and basked in the warmth of the air. She looked down at her wet and blood-soaked clothes, which were suddenly dry. The parka she’d been wearing was gone. She walked over to her grandmother, and Eloise patted the spot beside her, looking at her with a loving smile.
“Just the grave markers will be enough,” said Eloise. “All they want is a remembrance. They just wanted to be known. All that youthful energy, combined with the injustice of their murders—it creates such chaos when trapped.”
Finley didn’t have a voice. Emotion was a ball of cotton in her chest.
“We hold on so tightly to it all,” said Eloise. “All those negative emotions. We just cling to them. Or maybe it’s that they cling to us.”
“Or a little of both,” managed Finley, her voice just a whisper.
“Yes,” said Eloise. “Like a haunting. Places cling, too.”
“He took them because they were ‘Dreamers,’ ” said Finley. “Like me and like you. All those girls were somewhere on the spectrum. Why did he want them?”
“Abel Crawley had his own agendas,” said Eloise darkly. “He was a pain giver, a misery maker. As a child, he was content to hurt animals. As he grew older, his appetites changed. Even his own wife Millie didn’t know what he was, or at least that’s what she told herself.”
Finley watched as Eloise deftly linked wildflowers into a chain—yellow, orange, violet, blue.
“But his daughter Penny knew what he was. She tried to kill him but killed herself instead trying to escape him. But Millie clung to her, blaming herself for not knowing what her husband did when she was gone working.”
The chain of flowers grew longer and longer in Eloise’s thin fingers.
“That clinging love kept poor Penny in these woods. And Abel brought the Dreamers, the ones who could see her—for his shattered wife and to fulfill his own dark needs. Abel Crawley is a bad, bad man.”
Eloise shook her head, slow and sad.
“How could she stay with him?” asked Finley. “After everything he did.”
Eloise looked up at the sky, as if the answer might be there, then back at Finley. “Millie Crawley was quite undone by the loss of her daughter Penny. And she wasn’t all there to begin with, had a touch of what her son Arthur has, a slowness. She stayed because she had nowhere else to go, because she couldn’t leave Penny alone in the woods.”
Finley knew that it was so. She understood in that moment that it was Arthur she’d inhabited, his childish mind so confused, angry, and afraid. He was trapped here too with Abel.
“And then when Abel was done with them? Or Millie was? Or they became too much trouble? Then he just killed them?”
Eloise nodded grimly, her mouth pressed into a tight line of anger.
“He was also a Listener. He couldn’t stand the sound of The Whispers. He knew, like you guessed long ago, that they wanted something, all those voices.”
“What did they want?” asked Finley.
“They want to go home,” said Eloise.
“So,” Finley said, struggling to understand. “He thought the girls could quiet The Whispers, give them what they wanted—or needed?”
“Yes,” said Eloise. “Among other darker, more hateful things. He thought because they were Dreamers that they could show the lost ones home. But they were far too young. And their passing was as wrong and ugly as the others’. Even you wouldn’t have been able to help them, Finley. You would have just wound up trapped here, another voice in the trees, calling.”
“Calling who?”
Eloise lifted the flowers, which she’d turned into a necklace, and hung them around Finley’s neck. “Calling me. All this time, and I had no idea.”
“No,” said Finley, a sob nearly taking the word.
“Everything has its time and its season.”